History of Television

History Of Television: BBC Ghost Stories Presented by the Magic Lantern Podcast Team

Directed by Various

1h 45min

History of Television

There are no current or future screenings planned for this film.

Halloween should mark the beginning of the spooky season, not the end. The days are getting shorter, the weather is getting colder. There couldn’t be a better time to gather around the hearth at Austin Public and take in some ghost stories together. The UK has a long tradition of ghost stories of Christmas. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the obvious touchstone, but the idea goes back much farther than that. Fortunately for modern audiences, the BBC took up that torch in 1971 with their series, A Ghost Story for Christmas. The original run of the series was from 1971 to 1978 and it was then revived in 2005. For this presentation, I want to focus on the original run and a couple of installments that were adaptations of stories by M.R. James, one of the greatest practitioners of the ghost story to ever put pen to paper. These are moody adaptations by Lawrence Gordon Clark that took the then-unusual step for television of shooting on film (16mm), entirely on location, even though the budgets were miniscule. The result is some beautifully made television focusing more on suggestion and the stories’ literary roots. This is a program for all of us for whom it is Halloween in our hearts, no matter the season. Presented by Cole Roulain and Ericca Long of the Magic Lantern Podcast.

BBC Ghost Stories

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